Seal of the Worm

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  They had slept down here more than sixty times by anyone’s best guess, although Maure cautioned that, divorced from the world beyond, even the passing of time might not be the same. The halfbreed necromancer had little to offer save prophecies of doom, it seemed. Che had found it hard to believe that they could have been trapped in some small prison for so long without escape or capture, but she had misunderstood the scale of their surroundings. The world of the Worm was a world indeed. What she had seen from the ledge, with Cold Well spread out in the middle distance, was but a single segment of the Worm’s domain, and Cold Well but a single community amongst dozens of similar slave towns. The Worm had its lightless empire.

  Messel himself moved surely, crouching low and often with his long fingers trailing over the stone. Some Art led him onwards, and Che began to suspect that he was hearing through the rock itself, interpreting the minute vibrations of distant motion and letting them warn and guide him.

  Often they stopped, Messel leading them aside into cracks and overhangs where they could hide. He spoke little, and the supposed threats were often obscure. Once they heard wings, though – vast and slow-beating and strange. Another time, Che saw a hunting beetle, low-slung but as big as a horse, with its mandibles so long that they crossed over one another. Messel led it away, using a sling to rattle stones off its hide until it lumbered after him, then returning after a long anxious time of uncertainty to get them moving again.

  Once there was the Worm.

  The Worm they did not see, for Messel had found a shallow cave, and they all lay there barely daring to breathe. Messel’s manner had become agitated, almost frantic, where he had met all previous dangers with utter calm. This time he crouched alongside them, his hands clutching at his cloak as though trying to wrest some extra concealment from it. From outside they heard the scrape of armour, bare feet on stone, and Che tried to imagine some other race of blind people – but still just people no matter how fearsome their reputation. She failed to picture anything so tame. There was something about the quick, rushing movements out there – the way that, when they stopped, they stopped all at once, then set off all together. There were no words spoken at all, and Messel kept them still and quiet for a long while after the unseen Worm had gone.

  ‘Ants?’ had been Thalric’s suggestion. He, too, had picked up on the lack of any spoken communication in what had sounded to be a band of a dozen or so.

  Che had just shaken her head. The motion of them had been something other than Ant discipline, and she felt that the silence was not due just to an Art mindlink. Why she was so certain, she could not say. It was no magical intuition though, for when the Worm had been near she had felt what little sense of magic she retained being deadened, smothered.

  They have done something dreadful, she thought. Her knowledge of the Worm was scant, but she had been gifted with a vision of the forces mustering for that final battle that had seen the Worm driven beneath the earth, supposedly forever. They had been a thing to fear even then, but she compared what she had understood from that battlefield to what she had experienced just now and concluded unhappily that there was some new horror added to the Worm, some change that had been made, and not for the better.

  Thalric was her crutch as they travelled under the false stars of the Worm’s sky. She could tell that he was fighting to understand where they were and what had happened to them. It was a fight he could never win, but he was a survivor. The world had tried to kill him a dozen times, leaving scars on his hide as mementos. He had passed through the hands of so many masters that he had invented a new kind of freedom all his own. And he had stayed with Che through many trials, and he smiled when he looked at her.

  And he was a Wasp. That was a strange thing to find strength in, but half the time Thalric looked the world in the eye, and the rest of the time he looked down on it. He had been brought up on tales of his own kinden’s superiority, their ability to master anything. He was not exactly a good son of the Empire any more, but when she was at her lowest, feeling as though she was trapped in a pit she could not escape, his barbed wit would bring the world down to her level. He would make some cynical bleak joke of it all, and things would not be quite so bad after that.

  They had camped in a crack in the earth that Messel had scouted for them, but it was too exposed for them to risk a fire and so they huddled together for warmth. Meanwhile the man kept a blind watch nearby.

  Esmail was already asleep, or at least pretending to be; he seldom spoke, a private, dangerous man who lacked the past association the others shared. The underworld was left to Che, Thalric, Maure and Tynisa to face.

  ‘I don’t understand how anyone can have thought this place a good idea.’ Tynisa was staring up at those ersatz stars. Sometimes they saw one of the distant lights twitch and shudder, and knew that some luckless flier had been caught by it and was being reeled in.

  ‘They were desperate.’ Che wasn’t sure why she was defending the magicians of the ancient world, but the words came out anyway.

  ‘I’ve known plenty of desperate people,’ Tynisa remarked, and then: ‘I can remember when I was desperate, and the things I did, but this . . . Desperate deeds are spur-of-the-moment deeds. This took planning and patience.’

  ‘Power,’ put in Maure softly. ‘It took power. And when you have that sort of power, then desperation can do very different things.’

  ‘You’re missing the main point,’ Thalric’s acerbic tone cut in, ‘which is that the bastards who devised this place were never going to end up in it.’

  That silenced them for a moment, ceding him the floor.

  ‘Those old Moths,’ he went on, ‘your great wizards or whatever you call them – there’s nothing inherently magical about this story. Change the trappings and it’s everyone’s. Give someone a big stick, and tell them it’s their right, and they’ll use it. Desperation just means they’ll use it harder. So we all know Moths are useless mumblers who live up mountains and wring their precious grey hands over all these machines everyone else seems to have now. But they were executing your people on a whim a few centuries ago, Che. Give someone power, and at the same time you take away any qualms they’d have about using it.’

  ‘Well, the Imperial subject speaks from experience,’ Tynisa said acidly.

  ‘Yes, he bloody does,’ Thalric agreed hotly. ‘We know there’s no slave that wouldn’t wield the lash if you gave him the chance. It’s only Collegium that thinks there’s some mythic moral superiority.’

  ‘You don’t believe that,’ Che reproached, her eyes searching his face in the darkness. She saw the flaws there, the lines of doubt his association with her had marked out: the certainty in his voice was betrayed by his naked expression.

  Still, he came back with, ‘Che, since I met you, you’ve no idea how many stupid things I’ve had to believe.’ And she laughed at him then, feeling the weight of that buried place momentarily lifted off her shoulders.

  Later, when both Thalric and Tynisa had put their heads down, Che saw Maure stir, shivering. She reached a hand out, snagging at the halfbreed’s sleeve, thinking she must be feeling the cold, but the woman flinched back.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Che murmured.

  Maure stared out at that terrible sky. ‘No dead, Che. A place of death without any dead. I don’t know if you can imagine it.’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘I always sensed the dead. Even when I was very young, I could feel them. I got driven out of a lot of places before the Woodlouse-kinden took me in and trained me. No one better for that than the Woodlice. They understand everything there. I wish I’d never left.’

  ‘Why did you?’

  ‘Because I thought I had a duty, to the dead, to the living. I thought I was needed, to mediate between the two. And now I’m in a place where the living live like the dead and the dead themselves are gone beyond, utterly consumed . . . I’m sorry, Messel.’

  Che started. She had almost forgotten their guide, but the blind man
shifted and shrugged.

  ‘What a world you must come from,’ he said softly, an unplumbed depth of longing in his voice. ‘As for mine, I have no illusions.’

  At first it seemed that they were travelling to Cold Well simply because, in all this vast, hostile and inbred world, there was no other landmark on their maps. Messel’s agitation increased as they closed the distance, though, and even on his face Che could make out a certain furtive look, a need for them to hurry towards some deadline he had refrained from mentioning.

  In that place, suspicion came easily.

  As they stopped to camp after the second span of dayless travel, she cornered him, dragging him away from the others to the edge of their firelight, aware that Thalric and Tynisa would leap to her defence if she encountered some betrayal.

  ‘So tell me,’ she challenged the blind man.

  ‘I don’t understand.’ He was a remarkably poor liar.

  ‘What’s waiting for us at Cold Well?’ she pressed.

  ‘You wanted to see . . .’ Messel’s words petered out.

  ‘Who knows we’re coming? You’ve sent word ahead to the people who live there?’ Abruptly she was certain of it. ‘What’s waiting for us, Messel?’

  ‘Sent to them? No, no,’ he insisted. ‘But there is one . . . a mentor, one who you must meet. The Teacher, we call him. One who still tells the oldest stories. One who spoke of the sun to me once; yes, he did.’ The word was given great ritual significance that matched Messel’s evident lack of understanding of what such a thing as the sun could possibly be. ‘Him, you must meet, if you are to do anything, if anything can be done for you . . . He, only he.’

  ‘But he’s not of Cold Well.’

  ‘He is of all places – a traveller, a wise man,’ Messel insisted. ‘And, yes, I have sent word. I have left markings and messages since I found you, only for him. And he is coming. He is coming back to Cold Well for you, only for you.’

  She opened her mouth then to gainsay him, to refuse to place her hand in the trap. The echo within her mind called back, And then what? Where will you go, without him? What have you left to trust, if not this blind guide?

  After resting several times, they heard Cold Well before they saw it. The sound rang out across the stony expanses, cutting across the murmur of running water. They heard a disconcertingly domestic sound: hammer on anvil, as from any forge anywhere.

  Cold Well was a wound. That was Che’s first thought. It was a gash in the earth, jagged edged and organic, and it had been eaten there by human occupation, as though the mere presence of people had corroded the rock like an acid.

  Approaching the settlement at one of the points where a narrow track led, switching its way down, she saw how the miners had made this place their own. The walls of the pit were lined with round gaps like eye sockets, level after level of them, the inhabitants carving out their own community from the walls of the grave they had been set to dig. How many? She could see hundreds of openings and no hint of how deep they went or the numbers they housed.

  She did not realize how much light there was until she let her Art slip. She had assumed that the locals had as little use for illumination as eyeless Messel. Instead, though, firelight glowed from most of the entrances – the same weird hues as before, nothing so wholesome as wood providing the fuel, but still a sign of warmth and life in this barren wilderness. Deeper in, there were greater fires, too. Che could look down and see vast glowing vats, streams and strips of incandescence that were being constantly renewed as they cooled. They were smelting there, an operation of a size to gladden any Helleren mining magnate’s heart.

  ‘What is it they make here?’ she wondered, and Messel went still and looked back at her as he was about to start on the downward track.

  ‘Tin, copper, iron,’ he explained. ‘Salt-coal as well, though some must be brought in. Swords and armour for the armies of the Worm. Food for it in a good year. Sometimes food in a bad year too. We starve, then, some of us.’

  They were all holding back at the lip, unwilling to let themselves be drawn into the pit. Che was looking beyond, trying to make out more details of the scurrying figures who were bustling about the smelting works, ascending or descending the steep paths, but the glare of those fires was dispelling her Art.

  ‘I see no guards.’ Thalric, relying on the firelight, had made more headway. ‘How can you have a slave town with no garrison?’

  It was hard to tell what Messel thought of that, but his reply was hushed. ‘They come, often. For their tax and for our work.’

  ‘But you’re making swords,’ the Wasp pointed out. ‘Can you not fight?’

  ‘Fight the Worm?’ the blind man murmured, as though the concept was something he did not quite understand. ‘It has been tried, in earlier generations. Not since then. The price . . . the Worm is many. The Worm is . . .’ A shudder went through him. ‘The Worm is in all of us.’

  That pronouncement transfixed them, all trying to grasp just what horror he intended, but he said no more. Indeed, having spoken even that much seemed to give him pain. His lack of expression was maddening.

  ‘Why have you brought us here, Messel?’ Tynisa challenged him.

  ‘Why did you come?’

  Her sword cleared its scabbard, but then Maure was holding a hand up. ‘Please,’ the magician said. ‘We have come because we are strangers here, and we seek help. I beg you, tell us now if there is nothing to be had here. We’ll just . . .’ And her words failed her, because what was it they could ‘just . . .’? Where else could they go, in this abyss?

  ‘Help,’ Messel echoed, and began moving down again. ‘There may be help. I hope we may help each other. What else to hope for, in this place, but help?’

  ‘How much do we trust him?’ Tynisa murmured.

  ‘A cursed sight far less than just five minutes ago,’ Thalric spat, then glanced around. ‘And where’s that sneak Esmail?’

  Che snapped out of her scrutiny and glanced around. The assassin was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Just that, sneaking,’ Tynisa confirmed. ‘He’s been here before, remember. He was feeding us from these people’s pockets until Messel came. I reckon it was quick in-and-out stuff, and not too far in, even then. But he’ll be keeping an eye on us, don’t worry.’

  ‘And how much do we trust him?’ Thalric demanded.

  ‘Enough,’ Che decided, fighting a battle with them now that she had already lost against herself. She set off after Messel boldly, knowing the others would follow in her steps.

  Messel’s progress was halting, stopping and starting at no apparent stimulus as though trying to put off the moment when his arrival was noticed. But now the locals were making their appearance. What passed along the rows of eyesocket-like holes was nothing more than a murmur, but it served to populate each hole in turn. It was only moments before their arrival was the focus of a grand and near-silent audience.

  Almost none was of Messel’s kinden, whatever that might actually be. Those other faces were more familiar, and Che found herself searching from face to face, cataloguing the inmates of the asylum, matching them with the powers of the ancient world.

  The Mole Crickets stood out most, by sheer virtue of their size. Ten-foot tall at the hulking shoulder, white haired and onyx skinned, there were more of them gathered here than Che had ever seen. She knew they had an Art to move and mould stone – even to walk through it as if it were mist – and yet here they were, huge and solemn, prisoners and slaves of the Worm like all the rest.

  There were Woodlouse-kinden as well, and in fair numbers. She had seen almost none before – only the Empress’s adviser whom Esmail had killed, and perhaps one or two others. Here were dozens of them, tall and stoop shouldered with grey-banded skins and hollow faces. Here, too, were the Moths, with their blank white eyes that were still infinitely expressive compared to the vacant, socket-less faces of Messel’s pallid kin.

  Here and there she saw others, belonging to kinden she could not guess at, whose a
lien features were never seen under the sun. All of them wore similar clothes to Messel himself: cloaks and trousers and long-sleeved tunics of thick cloth. Some had scarves about their mouths and noses, too, or hats of the same fabric, with folded tops.

  But she judged that none of these would have use for the light that Cold Well was decked out with. For that, she must seek out more familiar features, for at least one in three of the denizens here was of her own kinden: the familiar dark-skinned and solid-framed people who dwelled almost everywhere in the world above and could endure anything.

  Even this, this abyss, this slavery, they could endure. Abruptly it no longer seemed such a virtue.

  Messel had stopped, brought to a halt by the sheer force of that massed regard; those he had led here clustered behind him, hands to weapons, unsure whether they would be welcomed or attacked or simply ignored. The air breathed with the sounds of the bellows, crackled with the distant molten metal, rang with hammers. Those at work had not paused for this novelty. They had quotas to make, perhaps, and from Messel’s account they had masters who would tolerate no slacking.

  And there were young children, Che noted. They crowded around the legs of adults of all kinden –Woodlice offspring, infant Mole Crickets, Moth children and eyeless pale children and more. Many pairs of arms had a child in them, men and women both, and there was a profusion of toddlers. A surprising number of the women showed some visible stage of pregnancy. All the most natural thing in the world, save for how quiet the children all kept, and yet some part of Che’s mind was making a calculation, sensing that the mathematics behind what she was seeing here were wrong.

  Messel spoke, not loud, but there was precious little competition from his audience. ‘Well, will nobody welcome me?’ He had his long hands spread, inviting censure or approbation, or anything other than this endless silent stare.

  ‘What have you brought, Messel?’ The speaker was a Moth woman, though it took a moment for Che to pick her out from the crowd. She bore a staff, just a plain length of worked chitin, but apparently this was all that was needed to be marked as headwoman of Cold Well.